CHAPTER 07

ALONE . . . TOGETHER

Remember, there is no such thing as an individual brain. Transformation requires a collaborative interaction, with one person empathically listening and responding to the other so that the speaker has the experience, perhaps for the first time, of feeling felt by another.

CURT THOMPSON, Anatomy of the Soul

HE MAY WELL be heralded as one of the most important people of the twenty-first century, but most of us have probably never heard of the winsome twenty-two-year-old Palmer Luckey. An upbeat homeschooler who began taking community college courses at age fourteen, Luckey loved video gaming, and he spent his free time buying and taking apart used virtual-reality headsets in his parent’s garage. He wanted to see whether he could come up with something that would make his experiences more realistic. By age eighteen he’d constructed his own headset, the Oculus Rift, from scratch.

Luckey planned to sell his headset in kits for a growing crowd of gamers interested in virtual reality. Instead, his invention caught the attention of some legendary software developers. It contained technology eons beyond anything on the market. Luckey joined forces with a company to develop the Oculus Rift for the market, and eventually Facebook purchased the company (and the technology) for somewhere around two billion dollars.

What does the Oculus Rift actually do, and why is it so important? The small, goggle-like headset enables users to be completely immersed in a computer-generated environment —sort of like 3-D animation on steroids. Cory Ondrejka, Facebook’s former vice president of engineering, described how this was different from anything we’ve ever seen: Through the use of 360-degree video cameras, we will share a sense of place and presence with others, which our brains will interpret as real, even though we are nowhere near each other. While Luckey’s vision for the technology was limited to video games, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is convinced it will be the next mobile platform to saturate the world:

Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face —just by putting on goggles in your home. . . . These are just some of the potential uses. By working with developers and partners across the industry, together we can build many more. One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.[1]

The goggles are still being fine-tuned to make them affordable and user-friendly, but already there is a growing number of apps waiting in line that will enable the user to wander around the inside of a pyramid among the ancient ruins in Egypt or to move through virtual rooms in cyberspace alongside friends and strangers alike. Hotels have already begun providing this type of virtual service to guests; it is more than likely that this technology will soon be a regular experience for many reading this book.

How vastly our worlds will once again change as we enter this hyper-experience phase of the technological revolution. As exciting as it will be, now is the time for us to consider its potential impact —whether the benefits of virtual reality are going to outweigh the costs to our psyches or our relationships, or whether the gains of this kind of cybernetic engagement will turn out to be as fulfilling as the promise. Can we assume, for example, that having this incredibly tangible way of connecting, one that even our brains consider real, will deepen our interactions or create greater authenticity and closeness with each other? Will virtual reality help us build better relationships?

If we learn anything from the past, the answer is probably no. The truth is that the more choices that digital technology offers us, the more complex our lives become, further compromising our ability to attend to each other. While we may connect in superficial ways to hundreds of people via social media, we struggle to find the time and energy for meaningful personal interactions with even a handful of close friends. Regularly feeling depleted, we too often opt for the convenient lure of digital contact (texting supersedes talking), rather than investing in real-time, face-to-face engagement with others. The cumulative losses of this are egregious to our souls and particularly so in our pursuit of authentic Christianity. From God’s perspective, spiritual formation can never be relegated to a solo endeavor. Oratio —loving conversations with God that lead to greater consecration —is deeply meaningful in times alone with God, but practicing it together is an indispensable component of any Christ follower’s formation in his image.

Formed in Community

Perhaps no group, with the exception of the nuclear family, suffers more keenly from the consequences of digital overuse than communities of faith, in which relationships are the very currency of spiritual growth. The problem is obscured, however, by a false sense of living out our spiritual destiny through cyber-connections. Believers can partake of a church service by themselves almost any day of the week via their computers, smartphones, or TV screens; keep up with the very latest in worship music online from their living rooms; receive powerfully written devotional blogs daily at their desks via e-mail; participate in inspirational causes by “liking” pages on social media; and join others in Bible studies and prayer groups through specialized apps. While these things and dozens more like them may be valuable tools for aiding our spiritual growth, they only seem relational; in actuality they take place in isolation. They can never replace the kinds of embodied relationships for which we are made.

When our Trinitarian God —Father, Son, and Holy Spirit —launched the human story with “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26), he established the pattern of communal life, and so it has always been. Our spirituality flourishes amongst the pulsating presence of others. This means that the Christian journey is uniquely incarnational: Not only did the Word become flesh and dwell among us, but together we also become the tangible, physical presence —the embodiment —of Christ on this earth. We must never take this lightly or let its beautiful mystery get buried in the busyness of our hyperconnected lives, for as Douglas Groothuis reminds us, “When the flesh becomes data it fails to dwell among us.”[2]

As members of a collective —the body of Christ in this world —we thrive through the physicality of being together. Paul yearned for this, writing to the Thessalonians that he felt as if he’d been torn from them and that his desire to see them face-to-face consumed him with earnest prayer day and night (1 Thessalonians 2:17; 3:10). The aging apostle John wrote that although for a time he was limited to writing letters, he hoped soon to be face-to-face with his family of faith “so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 1:12). Truth be told, we all long for and need this kind of communion, whether we realize it or not. Not only does interacting face-to-face with others enhance the well-being of our souls, but as it turns out, our brains are also actually wired for it.

There Is No Single Brain

My son and his family care for foster babies. I remember well when they brought baby Gina into their home. The back of her head was completely flat, an indication that she’d been left alone lying face up for the bulk of her young life. Placid to the extreme, baby Gina rarely cried; instead, she spent hours staring blankly at the ceiling. This didn’t last long, however. Once my son, his wife, two sets of grandparents, four siblings, and a host of friends began to love on her, the metamorphosis was amazing to behold. Gina quickly became a laughing, cooing, kicking, wide-eyed image of contentment, entertaining us all with her antics for months to come.

Attachment theory tells us that Gina, like all babies, came into the world looking for connections —her brain could not develop properly without it. Her initial lack of interactivity reflected what she had failed to receive in her early months. This is why it is said that there is no such thing as an individual brain. Our neural networks have been established through hundreds of experiences that began when we were infants in relationship with our mothers or fathers or other caregivers. Given the plasticity of our brains, our interactions with others will continue to shape how we see ourselves, other people, and the world in which we live for the rest of our lives.[3]

Simply put, each of us is “a story wrapped in skin.”[4] Our stories are inscribed on the neural pathways located largely in our prefrontal cortex. All of our lives we look to others, not only to make sense of what we experience but also to help us rewrite the pages in us that are flawed because of painful life circumstances or relationships. Even what we think we know of God has been formed through life in a fallen world. As a result, we need authentic and vulnerable connections with other believers in order to really know God. As Christian psychiatrist Curt Thompson explains, “Your relationship with God is a direct reflection of the depth of your relationship with others.”[5]

For years I believed that God needed me to “get the job done” and that his acceptance and approval rose and fell based on how well I was doing it. As an adult, I began to see that a biblical understanding of grace didn’t support this view of me or God, so I tried hard to change. But I couldn’t dislodge that deep-seated propensity to perform with God or others. One night I voiced my frustration to my husband, telling him that I didn’t know what to do if God didn’t need me. He smiled and said, “That’s just it: You really can’t do anything, can you?”

This wasn’t the answer I wanted, and the next morning I sat before God in tears, terrified at my growing feelings of vulnerability. After a time, I ventured out to try and share with my husband, but I couldn’t even articulate how I felt as we sat on the couch together. So he simply held me as I cried, and then at some point he looked me in the eyes and said tenderly, “Tricia, God doesn’t need you, but he wants you.”

I was undone. Later that morning, a friend came over and, in essence, spoke the same truth to my soul. This was the beginning of my new story, my new ability to experience God’s affection for me as his precious child, who didn’t have to perform to enjoy his love.

Heart-to-heart connections like these —connections that can alter our faulty stories, rewire our neural circuitry, and form us as Christ followers —won’t happen through snippets in texts or likes on social-media pages or even by entering into each other’s virtual reality. Person-to-person, face-to-face, embodied communion is essential for the kinds of bonds that God has afforded uniquely to human beings.

Mirror Neurons and Digital Relating

One of the more fascinating discoveries in brain science is the existence of what are called mirror neurons. These neurons fire when we observe someone else doing a specific action, as if we were doing it ourselves. For example, when you see a mother pushing a stroller, neurons fire in your brain almost as if you were actually pushing the stroller yourself. When we notice that someone is hurt —physically or emotionally —the mirror neurons in our brains simulate their experience for us as well, enabling us to empathize with them. Mirror neurons also trigger humor in us when we hear another person laugh, which is why laughter can be so contagious. The emotional component to mirror neurons is an amazing gift that has been given only to human beings. Only we can feel each other’s sadness or pain or happiness.

But we are called to move beyond feeling to acting —to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), to be tenderhearted toward each other (Ephesians 4:32), and to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). For this to happen, we need to be present to each other, something extremely difficult via digital engagement. Why? Between 60 and 90 percent of the time we communicate our feelings in nonverbal ways —through the expressions on our face, eye contact, physical touch, the inflections in our voice, or our body language. Whether we are the ones experiencing the emotion or the ones empathizing with it, we are dependent to a great degree on nonverbal cues, which easily get lost in a digital environment. Emojis and emoticons are sorely insufficient substitutes for heartfelt expressions.

I experienced this in a profound way years ago when e-mail was in its nascent stages. A friend wrote to me of how he was feeling directionless and without hope. While I felt sad for him and wanted to help carry his burden, I had no idea of the depth of his struggle. I assumed he wanted advice, so I gave it.

My concern and support did not come across in my e-mail. In my prosaic and rapid response, he heard only judgment. He responded by saying, “I was looking for a friend, not a judge and jury.”

In that moment I realized that there were some things that could never be meaningfully shared without person-to-person contact, and I determined never again to use e-mail to communicate anything of a sensitive nature. While digital engagement can surely augment our interpersonal connections, it is inadequate at best. At worst, its sterile structure can be dangerous to the well-being of our souls and of those we love. The more we are immersed in our cyber-worlds, the easier it is to lose sight of this; in the process, we end up squandering something of our own humanness.

Losing Our Humanness

In her sobering book Alone Together, sociologist Sherry Turkle writes of how digital devices have led to a new kind of self, one that has been “wired into existence through technology.”[6] It is a self, she contends, that is split between the virtual and the real, and as a result the lines between them are continually blurred. She shares the example of teenagers for whom the cell phone is almost a “phantom limb”: They sleep with their phones and sense them vibrating, even if the phones are shut up in their lockers at school. Digital natives who have grown up with technology at their fingertips from birth don’t necessarily view the virtual world as separate or even secondary to their existence but literally as a part of who they are.

As a digital immigrant, I do know, at least from life experience, how very distinct these two ways of being —online and offline —really are. And yet I, too, struggle with the boundaries. I find myself posting pictures on social media although I’ve been too busy to visit with a neighbor. I have gotten into the habit of placing my cell phone on the table when having a meal with a friend, as if digital interruptions supersede real-time conversations. Recently, a family in our church lost a child, and while I hope that the mom’s posting of pictures and painful struggles on social media is therapeutic and helpful, I have to wonder how many of us assume that we’ve shown true compassion by pressing the “like” button or commenting with some inspirational quote or verse. What is real and what is virtual in this hyperlinked life of ours?

On the one hand, we can never underestimate the benefits technology has wrought, even to relationships. I connect more now with some old friends and family members than I ever did before, simply because the Internet makes it so easy. I interact often with fellow believers from across the globe and have been blessed to make acquaintances with people I would never have met otherwise. Yet when relationships are reflected by friend counts on social media, when face-to-face conversations are supplanted by tweets and texts that we edit and delete, when we would rather swipe an app than sit quietly with a hurting friend, when we prefer superficial snippets of information over the messy complexities of relating in real time, what of our humanness are we in danger of losing? What of God’s image in us is slowly being extinguished as we rely more and more on technology and less on the gentle whisper of his voice, of his Spirit wooing our spirits to reach out and really touch each other?

In an assessment based on research into our digital lives by the Barna Group, Jun Young and David Kinnaman suggest that the most disturbing thing about this slow slip into the dominance of hyperlinked relationships is that at some point we won’t really want anything different —it will be too much of a bother.[7] Indeed, we all face a growing penchant to bond with technology —becoming inseparable from our smartphones, valuing our computers more than our business associates, or feeling like we have some sort of personal relationship with reality-show characters we’ve never met. As Sherry Turkle points out, at some point people will simply stop caring about the loss of real relationship, having “come to see our online life as life itself. . . . It becomes what we want. These seem the gathering clouds of a perfect storm.”[8]

It seems to me that those gathering clouds are growing darker by the day as technology produces further opportunities for us to blur the lines between the virtual and the real in relationships. This brings me back to the start of this chapter. Is it possible that the clouds will burst when the Oculus Rift comes crashing into our homes —when billions of us, if Facebook has its way, begin to use it to engage with our world every single day? Will we be tempted to replace embodied fellowship with cyber-groups or congregational worship with techno-events, neither of which demands anything from us since we never have to leave the security of our isolated worlds?

If so, then how should we as Christ followers prepare? How can we prepare to fight against losing the very qualities that make us human, that enable us to be Christ’s eyes and ears and hands and feet —for each other and the world —in ways that machines simply never can be? These are conversations we need to be having together in God’s presence, seeking his wisdom.

Monasticism and Table Talk

Many of us do feel the discomfort of digital dominance in our lives. In a recent survey conducted by Desiring God, almost 40 percent of the eight thousand respondents ages eighteen to thirty-nine agreed with the following statement: “My use of social media is uncontrolled and unhealthy. I check my social networks compulsively throughout the day, and it’s probably not good for me.”[9] This is the generation that has grown up with the Net, the ones who hold the future in their hands. While only 21 percent of older generations agreed with the statement above, it is going to take all of us making hard choices if we really want to turn the tide of technological tyranny. I believe that as the family of God, our life together depends on it.

In his book Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith suggests a unique approach to counteracting the constant pressure of cultural liturgies —many of which, as I pointed out in the last chapter, relate to our networked existence. Specifically, he calls for a sort of monasticism, though not by withdrawing, as we might normally think. Instead, he suggests that we reimagine for today’s world two characteristics of monastic life that could be formative for us.

The first has to do with abstaining from certain cultural practices that others would consider normal, not in order to pull away from the culture itself but to reject specific structures that may be detrimental to our spiritual health.[10] For example, we might decide to abstain from social media, at least for periods of time, because as a cultural liturgy, it fosters self-absorption and shallow relationships. In its place, we would seek to find more meaningful and embodied ways to engage with people. Or we might decide to abstain from all screen activity for segments of time each week —perhaps evenings or weekends —because as a cultural liturgy, being glued to our computers, TVs, or smartphone screens fosters insensitivity, mindlessness, and weak faith. In its place, we would seek to focus more on the world around us —going for walks with friends, having face-to-face conversations with family members, or praying or studying with others. In a similar suggestion, spiritual formation professor Bruce Hindmarsh calls for some in the body of Christ to become “digital monks,” to take lengthy sabbaticals from media in every way possible, and then share with the rest of us what they learn from the process.[11]

How might these or other examples of abstention from cultural liturgies address our need for oratio —loving conversations together in God’s presence that lead to greater consecration? Most importantly, they open up space for us to consider what has been at stake and what we are in danger of losing. Stepping away from digital life, even for a time, removes the barriers of distraction that often lead to fragmented connections with the people in our lives. Freed from the tedium of incessant interruptions, we can experience afresh the power and beauty in embodied relationships, something we may not have even realized we were missing. As we develop the discipline of presence, we begin to honor and attend to the people around us, opening ourselves up to the wonder of koinonia, the building of spiritual community.[12]

This leads to the second idea that Smith draws from monasticism, which is establishing rhythms of daily worship that “are holistic, activating the imagination through bodily participation.”[13] These do not have to take place in structured church services, although Smith describes some communities who are seeking to do just that. Instead, he points out that formative habits and spiritual disciplines can take place in far less formal settings —at our kitchen tables, for example. Hindmarsh agrees, noting that “it is no accident that Christ left us with a meal. Meeting face-to-face around a meal is a radical context for discipleship.”[14]

This suggestion is heartily affirmed by theologian and church historian Leonard Sweet, who wrote an entire book on the topic. In From Tablet to Table, he makes the sweeping claim that just by sharing our stories in the context of a meal together, we will strengthen our families, breed faith in our children, and form our identity as the people of God. Indeed, he declares that “the most important thing anyone can do to change our world for the better is to bring back the table —with Jesus seated at his rightful place.”[15]

The table takes center stage at some point in each episode of one of my favorite TV shows. Spanning three generations of law enforcement, the family at the center of Blue Bloods includes a retired New York chief of police, the current chief, his daughter (a district attorney), his two sons —one of whom is a married detective and the other a single beat cop —and three children. Each week the storylines follow two or three of the characters in their respective jobs. These storylines are often unrelated, but the show always culminates in a family meal. Dad leads out in a prayer of grace from the head of the table, and the meal commences, with food and drink passed back and forth amidst noisy chatter about each member’s life experiences. Young and old alike pass on their stories, share lessons, challenge ideas, and offer advice as this family participates in what clearly has been a tradition for generations.

Although the segment only represents a tiny portion of each episode, I always find myself waiting for the family meal. I know somehow that everything else will make sense once the family brings it together around the dining room table, for the storyline that undergirds all the rest is that of a family who depend on each other and find their joy in being together.

This is such a beautiful picture of how we, the body of Christ, can practice oratio. On a practical level, it demonstrates that as we invest the time and energy in embodied relationships through things like having a meal together, we make sense of our own stories, finding in our brothers and sisters what we really need to pursue God’s kingdom. But it is more than that. As a metaphor, it reminds us how our heavenly Father delights in gathering his children so that we can commune together. There, with Jesus at the head of the table, we share in the joy of being his family and living the real life he has planned for us. As Sweet suggests, “At the table, Jesus moves us from ideas about life and love to actual living and loving.”[16]

This is what we have to gain by helping each other regularly recalibrate our digital lives. Breaking bread together as families or small groups or congregations —in homes, restaurants, coffee shops, or neighborhood parks —creates the kinds of environments where oratio feels good and right, environments that even the most advanced virtual reality can never reproduce. Loving conversations in the presence of God around a meal, leading to greater consecration —this is the most ancient of spiritual practices, ever holding out the promise of deeper real-life relationships.